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Surprised this hasn't been brought up, except it seems like only [USER=22385]@Heroine of the Dragon[/USER] has mentioned it as I searched for it on the forums. So you might like this!

I've been fascinated by this thing ever since I came across it on a cracked.com article.

Basic overview:

It's an early 15th century handwritten codex written in a lanuage indecipherable even to this day. Many cryptologists and linguists have tried to understand the words in this manuscript with no avail. The manuscript is known for it's weird, sometimes creepy illustrations of unidentifiable plants and odd. . .rituals? If you could even call them rituals. Just all around head-scratching stuff. You can read more on the wiki page here.

I really want to one day see this book for myself. Lucky enough, the closest thing I'll get is THE ENTIRE COPY ONLINE.
SO COOL.

One of my crazier theories is that this is a book from an alternate Earth.

I think it is some medieval text on plant based alchemy. With all the plants and possible astronomical charts, I think it is a good bet that this is the case. I guess the main question is what it is written in.

^The star charts and astrological symbols would be very relevant to the botany. In preparing extracts from plants, the position of the stars and planets at the time of harvesting the plant and/or preparing the plant based product would have been considered very important.

As for the little female figures, I have several ideas. One is that they are homunculi. The other is that they represent plant "seed" or vital force in the plant.

...Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.

...Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.